It's all about the Software

So, maybe this is slightly off-topic but it may bite you some time. I'm not sure if two events are related so I will mention both. I leave my machine on pretty much 24/7. It is an ASUS P8Z77WS motherboard with an I7 3770 CPU. I bought the motherboard a few years ago to bring my horsepower up to snuff for SDRC mainly. It was a cheaper alternative to a late model machine. Anyway, a few months back the machine went wonky and would not boot. It turned out that something had trashed my bios settings, including the choice of boot drive. I fixed that and went on my merry way but I was nagged by what had caused this. Yesterday evening we had a power failure hitting about 5000 residences and when it came back on, the computer would not boot, even into the bios. The Q code was 98 which indicates that the boot process was trying to find the keyboard (console device). I thrashed about removing USB devices, powering up and down, and so on until it finally booted up. The last thing I did was remove the mouse receiver from the usb socket so I figured it had been zapped. But when I tried to reboot without it, same problem came back. To make a long story short, the problem was the BIOs itself. I had to re-flash it. Not upgrade mind you. Just reload what was there before. Apparently the flash memory device holding the bios was corrupted. Now it boots every time again. This is a drawback of flash memory. It is not 100% stable. I thought they had ECC in them to deal with this stuff but ECC can only do so much. In my searches of the web I saw many people with various motherboards reporting the same q code with a number of different proposed fixes. People rarely follow up when they fix something to let you know what finally did the job so I was many attempts into it before I found something that worked.

Anyway, SDRC is back up and running my overnight recording. Hallelujah!

Tony

Happy for you Tony, personally i would grabbed this event to convince my wife that i need a new PC
Serious now, did you replaced the battery on the mb? a bad battery can be the problem.

I have a very nice i7-5860K (I think) which cost a lot of money. Sadly the motherboard appears to be a bit poorly - doesn't always boot.

I've never had a CPU die on me.

"I've never had a CPU die on me."
Quite a long time ago I had a collection of compatible CPUs and motherboards.
One stopped working. I moved the CPU to a working board, it did not work.
I put another CPU into the original board, it did not work.
I do not know what failed first but I had the situation that the failed CPU damaged a motherboard in such a way that the motherboard would then kill another CPU..
73 Alan

PD3LK wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 3:31 am Happy for you Tony, personally i would grabbed this event to convince my wife that i need a new PC
Serious now, did you replaced the battery on the mb? a bad battery can be the problem.

Good point about the battery. They seem to last forever but this board is pretty old. I will replace it.

Edit: I just remembered that this might explain the first issue where my settings were lost, but not the second. The BIOS is not stored in the CMOS but in a flash device which does not need battery backup.

Yeah i thought about that too, but that was after my reply
Can't hurt though to replace that battery after so many years.